Nearly seven years after his professional fighting debut, Sheldon Westcott, a 29-year-old from St. Alberta, Alta., is on the brink of achieving his dream and earning a spot on the Ultimate Fighting Championship roster.

Each week across the Postmedia News chain, Westcott – normally a welterweight but competing in the middleweight division of the reality-TV competition – will share his thoughts with Postmedia MMA reporter Dave Deibert on the most recent episode of The Ultimate Fighter Nations: Canada vs. Australia. Episode 2 aired Jan. 22 …

The house is already starting to feel a little smaller. Members of Team Canada and Team Australia bickered at each other over cleanliness and general upkeep of the TUF house:

“What happened is, the first couple days when everything was all new and exciting, it wasn’t that bad. About the ninth day was the day that you’re sitting there, and people are starting to miss home a little bit more. You see guys walking around the house, they didn’t really want to talk to everyone else as much … Some people stayed in their room a lot longer. Some people went outside to sit. Some people went for walks. You go on a trip with someone for nine days, you can always take that break away. In the house, no matter where you go, there’s people there. There’s no alone time, no me time, nothing.”

For Team Australia, discomfort in the house was magnified by losing:

“Now they’re kind of zeroing in on the other people that are left, especially (the ones) they could fight. Everything becomes way more real. The whole situation is real. You put the cameras on top of it. I’d say about the ninth day was the one that just, whew, messed with people. You watched it. You could see.”

Though he’s outgoing and quick to clown around, Elias Theodorou is serious as it comes inside the cage. He was picked to face Zein Saliba in the second elimination bout of the competition, beating him via unanimous decision. Theodorou pushed the pace and wore down Saliba through much of the first round, scoring with a couple of big slams. In the second round, he was able to keep Saliba on the mat for much of the five minutes, grinding out the victory:

“Elias talks a lot – he loves being on camera – but at the same time, when it came to his preparation for the fight, it was no longer that funny, joking around guy. You didn’t really see that transformation as much on screen as what really happened … For the hour-and-a-half he was at the gym, when he was training, he didn’t have one single care about being on camera, or his looks,or his hair, anything like that. He just cared about the task at hand.”

The longer I waited for my number to be called, the more restless I became:

“I wanted to already have fought. I was one of those people who came into the house and I wanted to fight right away … Being in fight mode all the time is awful. It’s the only thing you can think about. You go to bed, you’re thinking about which guy you’re going to fight. While you’re sleeping, you’re doing a rear naked choke on your pillow.

“You’re stuck in fight mode and it’s the most mentally daunting part of the show. I wanted to fight early, to get it out of the way, so I had time just to decompress and enjoy. The longer and longer you wait, the later you fight, the least amount of time you have to actually enjoy the experience of being on The Ultimate Fighter.”

As Team Australia dwindled in numbers, they started trying to get any information on members of Team Canada:

“I started messing with them. Me and Nordine (Taleb) had talked about it before we sat down for that talk in the room. We told Team Australia that Nordine was a freestyle wrestler, a national level wrestler, when Nordine is nothing but an in-your-face, Point A to Point B striker who has one of the most dynamic striking styles on the show.

“Some of the stuff that we ended up telling Australia we were good at was hilarious. Some people are like, ‘I do tae kwon do. I’m a karate master.’ That guy’s never thrown a kick in their life.”

Taleb quickly became one of the locker-room leaders for Team Canada:

“Nordine wasn’t the bigger talker in the house. He just quietly paid attention. At the same time, he was also looking out for his team … As one of the initial leaders of Team Canada, Nordine really stepped up.”

Much of Team Canada’s success can be attributed to head coach Patrick Cote:

“Week 2 was honestly the case of Patrick Cote constantly being one to two steps ahead of Kyle Noke and his squad. If you watch the series, (when) they brought in their striking coach, Adrian Pang, this is already the second fight. Zein Saliba is getting ready for this fight already and his striking coach wasn’t even there until this episode. Where Patrick Cote, we get in the house, Day 1, his whole coaching staff is right there the entire time. Then before Elias’s fight, he brings in his nutritionist, to make sure Elias is putting on all the weight back properly, talking to all of us about the weight cut so all of us have that step ahead of all the Australians.

“For me, this whole episode, as much as it was about Elias, you see the preparation that obviously Patrick Cote had put in to us and Team Canada that Kyle Noke was not putting into Team Australia.

“As a coach, Patrick’s kept them behind the eight-ball the entire time. We’ve had to win the fights, of course, but we’ve got to pick the fights. We know who is fighting next. The guys who aren’t fighting next aren’t destroying themselves trying to get their weight down because they know they have a little bit of time before they fight now.

“If you looked at it from a tactical standpoint, Patrick was playing chess. Kyle Noke was playing checkers.”